So in the last
installment of this technically-a-series-now, I introduced you to Neopets.
Apart from embarrassing breakdowns in the face of inert sacks, there wasn’t
really much interesting about it. That would be because the one feature I left
out before was the games! There are many little flash games on that particular
website, and previously I planned to give this whole shpiel on some of the good
ones and the bad ones and a much more detailed description. I...don’t really
feel like doing that now, and in fact I don’t even feel like logging back into
the website. The last time I visited that website, it broke my spirit
completely and utterly.

I also MAY have
forgotten my login info.

So given that I don’t
plan on returning to this website, the remaining images in this article will be
one of the following: 1. Pictures of the site I took back when I was writing
the first entry, still planning on splitting it up later. 2. Hilarious
non-sequitur images of dogs wearing hats. We clear? Alright then, let’s get the
leftovers from last issue out of the way first. Remember Punchbag Bob? I just
thought I’d show the rewards page for the first fight I completed after him,
against an opponent with 10 health instead of 5000.

That codestone is
worth several thousand neopoints. That is all.

Speaking of codestones,
those are the things you need to level up. You go to the level up place and
pick a stat to raise by one single point (including HP, none of them raise more
than one at a time). Then, they ask for a random codestone and you have to give
it to them. Most of them can only be found through random events or buying them
off other players for several thousand neopoints or more. After paying, you
have to wait several hours before the training is done. To reach max level and
appropriate stats, you have to do this well over a THOUSAND times.

I had this whole rant planned
for systematically describing how horrible this is. But months later, the rage
has faded and there’s just so much else horrible to talk about, so we’re just
gonna’ move on.

Contrast!

Some areas of the site
have clearly been updated much more recently than others. Squint reaaaaaal closely between these two
images. If you examine the first, flatly colored image made of basic shapes,
and the second intricately shaded image that’s twice the size and has moving
interactive elements like highlights and flags blowing in the breeze, you may be able to tell which was more
recent. Wait, what’s that off to the side of the screen?

Oh that’s...good...?

Even though I took this
screenshot months ago, it was so long since I had been online that my pet was
actually starving to death. On the other hand, pets can’t actually die of
hunger and his mood was apparently still “delighted!” So y’know, I’d call that
good enough.

And with that we’ve gone
through all the images I took back when I had access to my account. You’ll note
I still don’t have anything on the games of Neopets. Originally I was going to
spend a ton of time on all of them, going through the bad ones, the really bad
ones, and the actually-kind-of-alright-for-a-little-bit ones. But to be honest,
do any of you care? Even if I still had my account, would you want me to
summarize hundreds of mediocre to average flash games, highlighting how some
were mildly amusing and how I was like, super good at Ice Cream Machine?

I don’t think so. I think
we’re mostly just here to watch me look at 10-year old content on a site for
children and yell at it in between constant snide remarks. For some reason. The
point is, months later, there was only one game on this site that left a
lasting impression on me. Only one game that I actually put a lot of time into,
that I gave the benefit of the doubt. Only one game that made me really, truly,
genuinely angry. Ladies and
gentlemen, the name of that game...is Neoquest.

What, you thought I
was kidding earlier? Nope, were doing this. Were making this happen.

A lot of the games on
Neopets didn’t seem to have much effort put into them. They were quick, they
were shallow, and they spoke to a team of content creators that was mostly
artists; spending much more time on making cute images to distract the kids as
opposed to gameplay that was actually fun. Neoquest wasn’t quite the same.
Neoquest tried to create a functioning, full length old-school RPG in your
browser. It tried to be deep and tactical, it tried to be interesting and
varied, and it tried to tell a long-form, well told narrative with lots of characters
and locations.

...it failed
fantastically to do all of these things, but that’s not necessarily the POINT.

The point is that on a
website filled with a bunch of shallow and low effort flash games, Neoquest tried. It tried, it was free, and what
it was trying to make was one of my favorite types of games. I really, really
wanted to like Neoquest. Because of this, I played a lot of it. I put a
substantial amount of time towards this game, made bearable by multi-tasking
playing it with doing other things. And it is ultimately because of this effort to enjoy it, because I wanted so badly for the game to not be terrible, that it
made me so completely, ungodly enraged when my time with this site finally
ended.

But I’m getting ahead of
myself. Before we get to the sources of my frustration, I should establish in
clear terms what Neoquest actually is. So first...let’s talk about RPGs.

“I have no particular
input on the current topic of conversation, but you will ignore this fact
because you find me adorable. Woof.”

As you’re probably all
aware, RPG stands for Role Playing Game. There are many different types of RPG,
to the point where it barely counts as a single genre. Neoquest models itself
after old-school RPGs like Final Fantasy
and Dragon’s Quest. These games
featured travel across an overworld to specific towns and dungeons as you went
through a mostly linear story, with random monster encounters having a chance
to occur every step you walked. Those would lead to turn-based combat on a
separate screen. Colloquially you might call these JRPGs (Japanese Role Playing
Games) because Japan started the trend and produces far more of that style of
game than English speaking nations, whose RPGs (sometimes called Western Role
Playing Games) usually feature some combination of real time elements and
player choice. Of course, these terms have become muddled over time, and the
only concrete thing we can take from it is that RPG classifications are
bullshit. But the point is it tells you what type of game Neoquest is.

...screw it; I’m going to
have to get pictures, aren’t I?

Yes, this is stolen.
Yes, you can see the watermark. No, I don’t care.

This is the very first
screen you’ll see playing Neoquest, and it gives you an idea of how it plays.
It also gives you an idea of how much it held the players hand, which is not at
all. In some ways, this was one of the things that I actually liked about the
game. Much like other old-school RPGs, it just drops you into the game world.
It gives you complete freedom to go anywhere you want at any time, and trusts
you to figure out the mechanics, who to talk to and what to do on your own
initiative. Of course, later this backfires when what to do next, particularly
side quests, can only be found out by tediously searching every nook and cranny
in a huge world filled with empty space and an excruciatingly slow run time.
Speaking of, it’s time I got to telling you what is probably the single
greatest flaw in Neoquest.

Any time you perform any
action in Neoquest, any action at all, from moving to talking to advancing
dialogue to choosing a combat action and so on...the page refreshes. When you click any of those arrows for
movement, to move a single square, you will have to wait for the page to load.
Now, the wait isn’t particularly long, as far as loading goes. But it happens.
Every. Single. ACTION!

Do you have any idea how
insanely, horribly game breaking this becomes?! You can’t even move to the edge
of your pathetically small vision without moving several paces! If you were to
compare the time it takes to move to the edge of your screen in any game like
this with regular controls, even though they can see about twice as far, it
would probably take you, I dunno, five times as long? Maybe more? Now combine
this with your poor vision, and imagine that you have a huge world filled with
random encounters. Oh, and those random encounters? Also load a new page every
time you perform an action.

For reference, here’s
the battle screen. Trust me, this was probably cutting edge design...for
browser games made several years prior to Neopets early-2000s launch.

I seriously cannot hammer
on this flaw enough, because it is sincerely one of the worst things about
Neoquest. And believe me, it has a lot to compete with! Despite its high
aspirations, Neoquest has plenty wrong with it. Though they give you complete
choice in the skill system, most of the skills are either worthless or require
extreme effort to be useful. Equipment is basically just for the purpose of the
world’s dullest side quests, requiring you to grind materials from enemies as
if this were some type of shitty MMO as opposed to a single player game where
it’s perfectly okay to not stretch
the playtime. Dungeons are labyrinthine and confusing in the extreme,
especially due to the low field of view. I didn’t last more than an hour or so
before I looked up maps on the internet, and I’m glad I did. There are dozens
upon dozens of unique enemies (to the games credit), and yet the vast majority
of them are only different in their health, damage and visuals. And the first
two are usually similar to any other enemies of the same level. The difficulty
is often punishingly cruel, requiring tons of repetitious grinding for
experience before you’re strong enough to proceed. And if you ever die in the
game? The astoundingly appalling penalty is that you are sent all the way back to the starting point of
the game. On all but the highest difficulty setting, you still keep your
levels, equipment and items. And yet, you have to traipse across half a
continent and an entire dungeon over again just to try again if you die to a
boss.

And yet still, in spite
of all of that...the loading is the worst part of the game. How is that
possible, you say? It’s possible because the loading makes every single other problem in the game worse. The slow leveling,
the long distances, the tedious side quests, and the constant random battles make
this game a huge grind. Even if this game ran at normal speed this game would
be a somewhat irritating example of old-school repetition taken too far. With
the delay of loading every new page, it takes that extreme and makes it several times longer, so that a decent
portion of your playtime is spent purely
watching things load, scattered so constantly that you don’t have time to
do other things in between. It’s like if every other flaw killed this game
through the death of 1000 stabs, the loading dipped every single knife in
poison which makes those stabs excruciatingly
and unnecessarily painful. If you
added sound effects, filing your tax return would be more entertaining than
playing this game! At least when you’re watching paint dry you don’t have to
keep pressing a button every other second to ensure that the paint keeps drying! All of this comes
together to create what is possibly the absolute dullest game I have ever played, apart from games that are intentionally meant to be dull. I am
rarely lacking words, but I really don’t know how to describe how absolutely
boring this game can be. It’s just...horrible.

...

...

...I played this game for
well over a dozen hours.

Bet you thought I
forgot about this, didn’t you? Ha, how could I?! Look at how adorable these
guys are! Ahaha, how would dogs even BUY top hats?!

So today, my dear
readers, you have learned something about me. I love RPGs. And I love certain
types of RPGs even more. If you provide me with a free copy of one of these
types of RPGs, and I have free time on hand and/or can multi-task, I will bore
through the densest layers of pure tedium that interactive entertainment will
allow. If I think I can get an interesting or worthwhile blog post out of the
affair, and the game in question has nostalgic appeal for me, I will keep at
said game for a frankly worrying amount of time, long after it has proven
itself to be a horrific train wreck of poor design decisions.

It pains me how bad Neoquest is, it really does. Because I am very
passionate about game design, and even more so in the genres I really enjoy.
And I can see many ways in which this game was so close; so close to being an actually enjoyable and well-made
experience. I’m aware that the development team probably wasn’t given much time
or funding and couldn’t be bothered to care beyond a certain point. I mean,
they were making free browser games for a kid’s website, we can only expect so
much. But this game has so many problems that, with just a little extra effort,
would be so easy to fix. If they had
added just a little more...everything, not in terms of art or play time but in mechanics. More enemy variety, more abilities
to choose from, more side quests to do and equipment to find. More respawn
points, more fast travel options, more types of items to use in combat. Some of
these things are more work than others, but some of them are fairly simple and
I strongly feel every one of them would’ve had a noticeable improvement on how enjoyable the game is. As it stands,
everything in the game, even the music, is just a little bit lacking.

...oh yeah, did I mention
this game had music?

...holy shit, someone
actually posted some of it on YouTube? Well I guess we know what we have to do
now.

The music of Neoquest is
in a kind of hilarious situation. You see, the game was a browser game a long
time ago, and I’m assuming it didn’t want the music to refresh every time you
performed an action and the page reloaded. So to counteract this, turning music
on would give you a little, postage stamp sized pop-up window. This pop-up window
would give you a small playlist of auto-cycling music that you could move
through yourself if you wanted. They didn’t give you all the games music at
once though, it actually changed based on whether you were on the overworld
(the biggest selection of like 6 songs), a dungeon (just a couple different
songs, although some late game dungeons no one got to had unique music), or a
battle (which had one singular tune). The songs themselves were really short
loops, between 20 to 30 seconds long. Let’s take a look at a few of them.

NOTE: Blogger no longer lets me find YouTube videos by their links, and these are way too obscure for it to find from a normal search. For now, I think you'll just have to deal with clicking on the links and opening them in a new page manually. It's okay son, you can do it, I believe in you.

Conquest is the one of
the overworld themes, and my favorite song in the game. Like all of its songs,
it’s extremely short and will get annoyingly repetitive if you listen to it for
too long. But that being said, I honestly, sincerely enjoy it. For what it is,
it’s a catchy tune, and I’ll always remember it in the miniscule portion of my
heart that recalls playing this game as a kid, never continuing long enough to
realize how unfortunately bad it really was.

Fire Rage is the song
for every fight in the game besides boss fights. As with most of the songs the
20ish second run time really hurts it. It’s a catchy enough little segment, but
that’s all it really is; a segment. The repetition here is sort of representative
of the game as a whole, which to me, is kind of sad.

So this article is
getting a bit long at this point, and I’m sure you all get the idea: Neoquest
is terrible and it saddens me. Before we go though, I’d just like to spend a
moment to detail the last time I ever played the game. This is, ultimately, the
point where even I could not imagine continuing any longer.

Let’s talk about the
Archmagus of Roo.

The Archmagus of Roo is
the fourth boss in the game. He is found at the end of the Temple of Roo. When
I got to him, despite fighting enemies constantly and unrelentingly beforehand,
and doing all equipment side quests, I was a couple levels under him. I was
getting worn down and tired of all the games bullshit at this point, so I didn’t
feel like grinding for hours to gain some levels. I figured with my something
like over 50 potions (the max I could carry) that heal half of my maximum
health or more, I could handle him. Was I correct? Why the hell would you even
ask that question, what is wrong with you?

At this point, I had, I
dunno, something like 125 health. The Archmagus of Roo had about 200 health.
The Archmagus of Roo had five attacks, and all of them had a roughly equal
chance of activating. One is a standard attack, doing decent damage to me (let’s
say about 40). The second and third are fire and lightning spells, which do 50
damage and have no chance of missing. This is all bad enough, as I could only
do about 20-25 damage a hit and seemed to miss every other attack. But hey, I had
all those potions, so I could power through that.

His next attack is a
stunning spell, which stuns the player...for three turns. Three turns in which
you cannot act, including healing yourself with potions. This is some seriously
unbalanced gameplay that throws a huge wrench in my plans. If he gets the right
combination of damage and stunning, I’m toast. And yet, things could still work
out. If I could just slowly whittle away at his health and constantly heal
myself, I might’ve been able to make it past this titanic pile of bullshit.

His final move is a
healing spell. It heals him for 80 HP. He can use this and all other spells an unlimited
amount of times.

Between the stun spell
and the healing spell, there was simply no way for me to win this fight. I
fought against this stupid, terrible boss for what felt like half an hour
straight, but was probably even longer than that. I used every single one of my
over 50 potions on myself, several times surviving by only a hair, and
otherwise threw everything I had at the boss. And yet, I’m almost positive I
never took the boss below 150 health out of 200.

And so I died. I died and
went all the way back to the starting area of the game. To reach the Temple of
Roo again, I would need to cross some plains, a mountain range, a forest, a
swamp, and a desert on the world map. When I reached the temple, this is what
would await me:

Those sure are some
high quality map sprites.

Remember, every single
one of those squares requires me to refresh the page as I move. And even
sneaking by, every dozen or two squares would lead to a couple minute long
random battle. And after I finally passed through the overworld and this floor,
there would be another floor waiting after this one before the boss. And even
after I did that, I would still have
to grind a couple hours to get back the dozens of potions I’d lost. And EVEN
AFTER THAT, I would have to grind through several more hours to get enough
levels that I might stand enough of a
chance to try fighting the boss
again. I might need to gain levels EVEN LONGER, because at this point I was
suspecting that the build of skills I had chosen wasn’t all that useful or
viable compared to the others available; and there was no way to reset those
choices.

In short: Fuck. That.

And so this is how
Neoquest, and by extension the whole of Neopets, died for me. This last case made
me literally, non-figuratively insulted that
someone could consciously create this set-up, when it was so obviously terrible
in so many ways. It really is disappointing, how something that so engaged me
as a kid and seemed to hold such potential for me even today, turned out so wrong.
But it did turn out wrong, and with this I finally reached the point where I
had no choice but to accept that. Neoquest and Neopets could’ve been good. But
they are not. They are terrible.